The authors publish a Christian funerary inscription in Greek discovered in 1961 during the archaeological excavations in Tafa (Lower Nubia, south of Aswan), now in the Náprstek Museum (Prague). It is the third inscription known from this site which is dated by indiction and seems earlier than the other ones: possibly end of the 6th century or 7th century AD.
This article takes a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the spelling of the genitive case of the word ΙΝΔΙΚΤΙΩΝ as ΙΝΔΙΚΤΙΩΝOΣ or ΙΝΔΙΚΤΙOΝOΣ. It is first shown that the editors of documentary papyri supplement this term in abbreviations and lacunae mostly with the omicron spelling. Chronological quantitative analysis shows that this is also the spelling that is used by ancient writers in contemporary documents. The conventional spelling in documentary papyri between the fourth and eighth centuries in Egypt may thus have differed from what is prescribed in literary sources.
The article points out misspellings of the word ΙΝΔΙΚΤΙΩΝ occurring in papyrological and epigraphic publications. Determining the correct spelling of the term entails conclusions regarding, more generally, the issue of editorial practices.
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